I’d been dubbed the resident All Hallow’s Eve expert, so I’d been put in charge of designing, or at least identifying, “authentic” costumes for each of them.
After I’d given everyone a list of traditional Halloween costumes from Overworld, Jolie chose “Egyptian Mummy,” Draken “Werewolf,” and Miranda decided to go with “Vampire,” and went all-out on the Victorian angle. Luc decided he liked the sound of “Mad Scientist,” Nyx chose “Ghoul or Dark Spirit,” and Darragh got it in his head to be “Dead Pirate.” Dervish Walker, who’d also decided to tag along, opted for “Zombie.”
Even now, Miranda was working on Dervish in the other room. We’d decided to split up our group into pairs, so that no one’s costumes would look too much alike. Everyone was supposed to meet up downstairs at six-thirty.
No one liked make-up as much as Miranda, and no one was as good at it, either, so I knew she’d do an amazing job on not only her own costume, but also Dervish’s.
For the same reason, I was determined not to let Jolie down.
After I’d made her suitably gross, I added Ancient Egyptian flourishes to balance things out, including iridescent-blue scarab beetles that crawled all over her, shimmers of golden hieroglyphs that rippled around her limbs, and a gorgeous Egyptian necklace of lapis lazuli.
I also magicked her a half-broken, golden, skull mask for her face.
She loved it.
“Oh my goddess!” she squealed. “This isperfect,Leda! I absolutely adore it!”
I felt some of my anxiety ease.
I watched her as she stared at herself in the mirror, a huge smile on her face. I hadn’t had much opportunity to design costumes in Overworld, whether for myself or anyone else, so I’d mostly been winging it. I knew “authenticity” didn’t matter, per se, as there was no real comparison to costumes on Earth, but I wanted her to like it.
“It’s not too scary?” I asked, watching her bird of paradise primal looking at her with alarm from where it perched on the mirror frame. It kept hiding by the curtain where it flapped its wings, its eyes wide with nervous curiosity.
“They’re supposed to be scary, right?” Jolie asked.
I nodded. “Traditionally, yes.”
“What are we doing for you now?” she demanded, turning on me. “I didn’t hear what you’d picked out for yourself, but it better be good! You know Miranda. She’s going to behugelycompetitive about this, and she’ll be absolutely furious if we justlether win, without even putting up a good fight.”
I grinned when I realized Jolie had been thinking along the same lines as me.
“What about Frankenstein’s monster?” I asked. “The female kind, I mean. I could be Bride of Frankenstein?”
Jolie frowned. “You’re going to have to explain to me what that is.”
After I used a lot of words, and a few chimaeric illusions, to show Jolie the Bride of Frankenstein, Jolie dove in with enthusiasm. She had me don a long, black dress of hers that no longer fit her, and altered it magically first to tighten andshorten it, then to shred the hems. She used some other cloth scraps to lengthen the sleeves, then shredded those, too. She spent the longest time making freakishly real-looking seams along different parts of my body, including my neck, so that I looked like I’d been sewn together, and changing the skin tones slightly for different “parts” to really sell the effect.
It was when she was working on my hair, coaxing it into a crazy bouffant with jagged streaks of white-grey through the sides, that the question blurted out of me.
Like I said, I really hadn’t intended to ask it.
I hadn’t intended toeverask her about that, although I’d suspected he’d meant her when he first ranted about “one of your friends” in that empty classroom.
“Did you…” My throat closed, right before I glanced up, meeting Jolie’s eyes. “With Bones,” I said, feeling my jaw harden. “Did you sleep with him?”
Jolie froze where she’d bent over my hair, a magicked comb in one hand.
One look at her face, and I knew the answer.
She stared at me, her normally stunning, light-brown eyes now an opaque, murky white from my spells. Even through all of my distortions and tweaks, I saw her eyes widen, her full mouth drop slightly open. I couldn’t help thinking about how beautiful she was, how she looked pretty even now, with all of that crap distorting her face.
I definitely felt the understanding reach her magical aura. Once it had, anger hardened her features, selling the mummy illusion more than my spells ever could.
“He told you,” she said.
I hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“What an absoluteprickhe is.” She visibly fumed as she straightened, the comb now gripped tightly in her hand. “I didn’tsleepwith him, Leda,” she said next, looking down at me, thatfury even more pronounced. She hesitated, then admitted, “Ididsnog him, and let him do far more than I should’ve done. He found me in Nice, already plastered, only a few days after you left me to return to London.”
